CONCLUSION
Never before, in any society, had the pursuit of wealth been legitimated,
much less celebrated for everyone.
Robert Heilbroner
Never before? The pursuit of wealth has not yet been fully legitimated, much less widely celebrated for women.
Both women and men living in Great Britain, France, and the United States today have more space to define and pursue their economic and sexual self-interest than they have ever had before. But pursuit of wealth is still considered a distinctly masculine priority. And even as greater material wealth has come into women's reach, doubts about reaching for it at the expense of all else have grown. The great historian of economic ideas, Robert Heilbroner, was right to observe that ‘‘the worldly philosophy” of economics was the ‘‘child of capitalism.’’1 The child is growing up now, in a world very different from that inhabited by her father.The female pronoun calls attention to gender in a way that the more typical and putatively universal male pronoun does not. Most educated readers know that the word ‘‘she’’ seldom appeared in liberal political theory or classical political economy. But they don’t know what a difference that non-appearance made. Recognizing that women might pursue interests inconsistent with their own, the fathers of economics banished them from the realm of social theory. The androcentric blinders they created blinded them for centuries to the relevance of women’s unpaid work and the impact of expanded wage employment on family life. These blinders also obscured
the ways in which patriarchal rules and norms helped stabilize an emergent capitalist economy.
Most economists have either focused their attention on the market or described non-market institutions like the family and the state as though they operate much as markets do. But the family and the state cannot be described purely as realms of individual choice.
Both institutions shape human character, social norms, and individual preferences. Both institutions enforce obligations for the care of dependents. The rise of the welfare state is sometimes described as a vastly inefficient intrusion into the market economy. Yet welfare state spending on education, health, and old age security finance forms of care that were traditionally provided by families, not through markets. And the transfer payments made by governments today remain small compared to the transfers of money and time that take place within families.2The United States ranks among the most affluent capitalist countries in the world. Women now represent about 50 percent of the American paid labor force (although many work in part-time rather than in full-time jobs).3 Yet about half of all the work performed in the country, measured in terms of hours, is not paid for by anyone. It takes the form of housework, shopping, telephone calls and email, caring for and helping others, and participation in organizational, civic and religious activities.4 Many individuals go through a stage of their lifecycle in which they live alone. But almost all grow up in families and most grow old—or hope to—with the assistance of families, friends, and neighbors.
If we use the word “capitalism” to describe the economic world we live in, rather than some idealized abstraction of economic texts, we should recognize that capitalism is not equivalent to ‘‘the market” but to a complex combination of markets, families, communities, and the state. The economic success of individuals can be defined in terms of their income and wealth. The economic success of families and nations is defined in terms of their ability to sustainably reproduce themselves. Successful social reproduction requires concern for the future not just the present. It requires concern for other people's children, as well as one's own. It requires commitment to the stability of an entire ecosystem, not merely a single nation.
The pursuit of individual self-interest can benefit us all only if we define our interests to include not just concern for others, but also moral obligations to them.The Avenues of Greed and Lust
Most economists proudly claim Adam Smith as the father of their discipline without acknowledging a mother. Despite the criticisms of Smith and his discipline that I have offered here, I believe that he would agree with much of what I say were he alive today. In his world, custom, law, and religion confined markets, and the expansion of markets represented in many ways, a liberating force. In today's world the cultural legitimation of selfish pursuits has gone further than he could have imagined. A man who acknowledged the possible corruption of moral sentiments would surely warn (like Alan Greenspan, post-2008) against overconfidence in self-regulation.
A variety of field experiments show that individuals living in societies lacking opportunities for market exchange behave in particularly selfish and opportunistic ways.5 Yet experiments also show that men and women are sensitive to small differences in institutional environments. We tend to behave selfishly when we are told that is appropriate, or where we fear that others will take advantage of us if we don't.6 A recent commentary on financial meltdown updates Karl Polanyi's emphasis on the ways markets are embedded—or disembedded—in society. ‘‘Obviously the greater the market pressure to excel in the short term, the greater the need for pressure from outside the market to consider the long term. But that's the problem: There is no longer any serious pressure from outside the market.''7
It is difficult to determine if we are any more greedy or lustful than we were two centuries ago. We can't measure individual desires and we lack clear standards of comparison for changes over time.8 Fewer of us now believe in the infinite punishments of Hell, administered by an all-knowing God.
If individuals are rational economic actors, they may respond to reductions in the perceived risk and cost of greed and lust by acting more selfishly. On the other hand, if individuals are not (and have never been) very good at balancing the pleasures of the flesh against the tortures of the soul, this may not matter much.In a lovely variation on a question posed by the Academy of Dijon in 1750, The Templeton Foundation recently invited a range of public intellectuals to address the following question: ‘‘Does the free market corrode moral character?”9 John Gray gave the answer that best conforms to the analysis presented in this book: ‘‘It depends.” It depends on what the term free market means and the context in which that market operates. A market for food may be virtuous as long as helpless individuals are not allowed to starve. A market for labor may be virtuous as long as everyone willing to work can find a job. A market for care may be virtuous as long as it encourages personal commitments and affections. In her paean to the bourgeois virtues, Deirdre McCloskey claims that capitalism can be virtuous, but says little of the particular efforts that might be required to make it so.10
The positive effects of capitalist development are most apparent when it undermines feudal and patriarchal property rights or authoritarian regimes. Its negative effects are most apparent when it weakens institutions that enforce moral obligations. Albert Hirschman emphasized the complex and contradictory effects of capitalism long ago, yet hardly mentioned women. 11 The preceding chapters show what a central role gender inequality has played in economic theory and economic practice. Even the most enthusiastic advocates of a market economy felt anxious about the extension of individual rights to women. The significant, if limited, gains that women have made over the last one hundred and fifty years testify to a widening of the avenues for the pursuit of self-interest.
One can happily traverse these avenues and still worry where they lead. King Midas rued the power that he gained to turn everything he touched to gold—his food, his drink, and his own daughter.The gendered history of self-interest illustrates a coordination problem. It is most profitable to be selfish when others are altruistic. Yet even altruists will punish those who don't reciprocate. In the early stages of cultural individualism, men asserted their own rights but reasserted women's obligations for the care of others. After centuries of gradual and uneven effort, women gained the power to assert the same rights as men. They were less successful persuading men to accept greater obligations. Women have continued to assume most of the costs and risks of family care, partly because they fear the consequences of what might happen if they don't. It will always be difficult to agree on the best balance between our own interests and those of others, including future generations. But this is the balance we should seek to find, rather than simply trusting either to God's will or the so-called magic of the market.
NOTES TO CONCLUSION
1 Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers, 7th edn (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), p. 313. The epigraph to this chapter appears on the same page.
2 Nancy Folbre, Valuing Children. Rethinking the Economics of the Family (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
3 Casey B. Mulligan, ‘‘A Milestone for Working Women,” New York Times, January 14, 2009, available at http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/gender/, accessed January 25, 2009.
4 Bureau of Labor Statistics, American Time Use Survey, Table 1. Time Spent in Primary Activities and Percent of Civilian Population Engaging in Each Activity, Averages Per Day, By Sex, 2007 Annual Averages, at http://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.t01.htm, accessed January 24, 2009.
5 Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles, Colin Camerer, Ernst Fehr, and Herbert Gintis, eds, Foundations of Human Sociality: Economic Experiments and Ethnographic Evidence from Fifteen Small-scale Societies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
6 Samuel Bowles, ‘‘Policies Designed for Self-Interested Citizens May Undermine ‘The Moral Sentiments’: Evidence from Economic Experiments,” Science 320 (20 June 2008) 1605—09.
7 Michael Lewis and David Einhorn, ‘‘The End of the Financial World as We Know It,’’ New York Times, January 3, 2009.
8 Samuel Bowles, ‘‘Endogenous Preferences: The Cultural Consequences of Markets and Other Economic Institutions,’’ Journal of Economic Literature 36:1 (1998), 75—111.
9 See the full exchange at www.templeton.org/market/, accessed January 24, 2009.
10 Deirdre McCloskey, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
11 Albert O. Hirschman, Rival Views of Market Society (New York: Viking, 1986).